


A Steadfast Heart

by fmo



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, M/M, could be interpreted as friendship or romance, movieverse, natasha and bucky have a brief thing but it's not the main focus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-25
Updated: 2014-03-25
Packaged: 2018-01-17 00:28:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1367260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fmo/pseuds/fmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"A hundred years to a steadfast heart is but a day."</p><p>Bucky doesn't fall, but Steve still crashes the plane alone. 90 years go by; Bucky doesn't age.  Steve is found, but he doesn't wake up.</p><p>(Or, Bucky and Steve do Sleeping Beauty, kind of.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Steadfast Heart

“Don’t do this, Steve,” Bucky says over the radio. “There’s gotta be another way.”

There has to be. After all they’ve done, it can’t be right for Steve to end up like this.  “Don’t you do anything stupid ‘til I get back,” Steve’s voice says, turned tinny by the radio. Bucky remembers looking back at Steve, small-shouldered in his tan jacket but standing straight, all alone under all the bright lights of the Stark Expo.

He knows what he’s supposed to say. “You’re definitely taking all the stupid with you,” he says, even though he thinks his voice gives out on the last word. But even as he’s talking, the radio becomes a steady stream of static, and he’s not sure how much Steve heard. He meant to try harder, to say something good, to say what he’s never been able to say about the little guy from Brooklyn that he's always followed.

“Steve?” he says. “Steve?”

Next to him, Peggy is very still, and Bucky puts his face in his hands. This isn’t right, it’s not right, he thinks.

Later, Howard takes them both to his fancy apartment in Knightsbridge, and he and Peggy and Howard drink something. Later, Bucky and Peggy kiss one time, because maybe between them is the place where Steve is most real. Later still, Howard swears he’s going to find Steve, he’s going to search forever until he finds him, and Bucky goes along the first few times but then he stops because. Just looking out at all that ice, and thinking Steve is alone there somewhere.

And time keeps going all the same.

He gets his honorable discharge from the army and his medals and all of it, so he gets a nice place in Brooklyn, not a whole house but a nice new apartment with everything in it that actually works, and he meets some nice girls and thinks, this is the future. This is what I was promised.

Maybe it was never going to be right, or maybe it’s just not right without Steve. Maybe it’s Bucky himself after the war that was never right. 

After a year, he goes back and they take him gladly. He’s good at being a sniper; this, he remembers.

Five years after the war that Steve died to end, there’s another war. They send him, so he goes. The army, the SSR, the CIA. Bucky loses track.

Ten years later, he’s brought into this new thing, SHIELD. He’s surprised to find that Peggy’s in charge. But the strange thing is, when he sees her, is that she’s gotten hardened, more glamorous. She has less of the soft loveliness that makes him think of Steve. She looks—

Fifteen years later, he gets it. _Older_. She has to take him into her office and explain it to him. “Sergeant,” she says, her accent making the word sound gentler than when he says it, “have you realized—”

He hadn't, but he looks in the bathroom mirror that night. Turning his head to the side, he looks at the sides of his face, at his eyes. He squints at his forehead. If he stands back and looks at himself from the waist up, he isn't half the image of the man who left New York before Basic. But if he looks at his face in pieces, she's right. There's no new lines here, no change in that place: it hasn't aged. He hasn't gotten older.

When Bucky goes back to SHIELD after that, maybe Steve is still there, between Bucky and Peggy. Except this time he's there in the fact that if Steve was here, if Steve was here and married to Peggy like he would be, it would be Steve now that wasn’t getting older while Peggy was. Because if whatever junk they Zola injected into Bucky did this, then Erkine’s formula definitely would have done the same. Sometimes, when Bucky sees Peggy in the years after, he thinks it's better Steve never had to look at himself and his wife and slowly come to this understanding. But those times are few, because Bucky's not that selfless.

Peggy and the other Commandoes get older, but Bucky just keeps going on. In Vietnam, an explosion takes off his left arm but Howard builds him another one. In his workshop, Howard says that he’s _still_ going out on his expeditions, and he and Bucky finally have it out. They're both good at anger.

“You, _you_ are telling me to give up, Barnes?” Howard says.

“No!” But. Howard doesn’t understand that for Bucky all this means is that the waiting is dragged out on and on and on. Steve ended, but Bucky has to go on.

In 1990, Howard dies, together with his young wife. Bucky goes to the funeral and he and Peggy stand together, along with Gabe and Dernier. The others are dead already.  Howard has a teenage kid who seems either drunk or high or both; Bucky doesn't talk to him. At least it’s over, he thinks, but he hopes he doesn’t say it out loud. Captain America will stay lost.

In 1995, Bucky goes off the grid, and he’s good enough to stay that way. He doesn’t want to hear from SHIELD any more.

In 1998 and in France, he gets involved with a red-headed Red Room agent just at the knife-edge when she’s thinking the word _defection_ , and at 3 a.m. in the bathroom of a cheap bar she sees his arm and realizes who he is. “They call you the Winter Soldier,” she says in her American accent without a hint of Russian.

He doesn’t tell her his real name; it probably doesn’t mean anything to her anyway. Real names aren’t anything to the Red Room.

They steal too much time together, and then when the Red Room and SHIELD catch up with her he does the smallest favor and keeps them off her scent long enough for her to lose them, or so he thinks.

 In 2010, the red-head is a SHIELD agent and she finds him, which is a surprise. He’s taken the arm off by then, because Howard's not around to fix it any more, but you don’t need a metal arm to drive a 16-speed truck. He’s seen some things on the TV that he's sure SHIELD's involved in, things like Howard’s kid in a metal suit blowing stuff up, a green guy smashing up Harlem. This is the modern world, but it's not his. He doesn’t know why she’s there.

She has a manila envelope, which she gives to him, and it’s full of photos. He’s curious. He picks up a single photo, looks at it—a shield, Steve’s shield, just visible under heavy ice—and drops it on the table and backs away. “Who was it?” he asks, throat tight. “Howard’s kid?”

 “Some scientists."

“Haven’t seen this on the TV,” he says. You’d think the government would be putting on some big red-white-and-blue funeral, and all the TV channels would run Captain America specials.

“It’s still a secret,” she says. Everything about her seems kind of still, now. Before, when he knew her, she was all brutality; now she only moves when she has to. “Captain Rogers is alive, but he hasn’t regained consciousness.”

Bucky feels his lips echoing _alive_ although he doesn’t say anything out loud. Steve’s alive but, what, in a coma? Not dead but—

“Okay,” he says.

He gets in the car with the red-head, who is called Natasha by someone on the phone (he overhears her conversation as she drives). He realizes he’s just wearing his old jeans and a denim jacket (with an empty sleeve) and a t-shirt and his hair pulled back in an elastic band; not the picture of Bucky Barnes or the Winter Soldier anyone’s thinking of. Not that he cares, but. Steve. Well, Steve’s seen him sitting in his apartment in August in his underwear, so.

Heads turn as he walks into SHIELD; Bucky’s heart hammers, but not because of the SHIELD goons.

And then. They’ve painted up some room to look like their idea of the 1940s—just right enough to be eerie—but there, in a bed with a few sensors stuck to his skin registering a barely-there heartbeat, is Steve. Steve.

With the color in his cheeks that Bucky knows, but without the blond stubble that Bucky got used to seeing on him while when they were all camping out in forests in Europe. With his hair neatly combed by someone, actually just the way Steve used to do it. Wearing a white t-shirt, his chest only just showing the signs of his breathing, his eyes closed. Steve’s lying on his back and he looks peaceful, even if he never slept on his back like that in his life. Bucky hasn’t even thought of that in so long: big or small, Steve always curled up on his left side, usually with the blankets up over his shoulders, and he always looked a little worried in his sleep.

Now Steve’s face isn’t even touched by the slightest cut or bruise. He looks too peaceful and perfect and so, so real. If only it wasn’t for the machines showing that there’s only the barest bit of life in him.

Automatically, Bucky sits on the side of the bed by Steve’s legs. He’s spent a long time in this pose; his back knows the ache well. “How long is it?” he asks the agent (nurse?) who’s watching him. She’s wearing a fake WAC outfit, for some reason.

“He’s been here for four months,” she says.

“Steve,” Bucky says, putting his hand on Steve’s forehead like he always did when he thought Steve was sick and trying to hide it. There’s no fever now, although he still has the warmth he got from the Serum. But it's an old habit. “Hey, it’s me,” Bucky says, moving his hand to Steve’s shoulder. He's spent a lot of his life having to wake Steve up, but he's always been able to do it until now.

Steve doesn’t stir at all. “Maybe you’re just taking a long time waking up,” Bucky says to him.

The machine starts going off like an alarm, and Bucky glances at the agent and then back down at Steve, Steve’s face, where that little frown is appearing that was always there while Steve slept. And then Steve’s eyes open. It takes him a second, but then he looks over and sees Bucky and says, “Buck?” and then, softer, “Bucky, what happened to your arm?”

Bucky only realizes he’s laughing when he takes his hand away from his mouth to hold on to Steve’s and help him sit up. “Bucky, I’m serious,” Steve says. And then he says, “When’d your hair get so long? How long was I out?" 

“Oh my god, Steve,” Bucky says, finally throwing his good arm around Steve and accepting Steve’s own hug in return. “Too long.”

**Author's Note:**

> I still can't get over the Captain America parallels to Sleeping Beauty/Snow White. It SPEAKS to me. 
> 
> Please comment!
> 
> Come say hi to me at fmowrites.tumblr.com, and if you found this fic through a rec, please tell me! I love to hear about being recced.


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